Everybody knows Long Island, that suburban wasteland with town after town of overweight, overindulged, unsmiling wannabes. Growing up on the Island, I spent numerous summer week- ends feeling insecure and out of place at the Walt Whitman mall, my classmates shopping for Jordache jeans and hoochy-coochy Gucci bags. The boys and girls all looked alike, their feathered hair and nose jobs a sign of social status. If their noses weren't already fixed, not yet fashioned into perfect little WASP-like buttons, then they walked around in-process, proudly sporting strips of white tape across their small triangular nasal cast.
Fortunately, I grew up on the wrong side of the Island.
After years of saving our rhinoplasty funds, my family encouraged me to make a trip to Asia, where, standing on a sidewalk in Ho Chi Minh City, I watched a generation of young Vietnamese crowd the hot summer city, zipping through the streets on motorbikes, boys and girls with straight black elegant hair, wearing knock-off Jordache jeans, sporting small tiny noses lying flat across their bright brown faces. From a street shop doorway, one brown face approached me, a girl with a lotus-like grin. Her fist rose up, her thumb pointing skyward, sticking up like a stamp of approval.
"Madame, Madame," she said, nodding at my New York schnozz.
Everybody knows Long Island, that suburban wasteland with town after town of overweight, overindulged, unsmiling wannabes. Growing up on the Island, I spent numerous summer week- ends feeling insecure and out of place at the Walt Whitman mall, my classmates shopping for Jordache jeans and hoochy-coochy Gucci bags. The boys and girls all looked alike, their feathered hair and nose jobs a sign of social status. If their noses weren't already fixed, not yet fashioned into perfect little WASP-like buttons, then they walked around in-process, proudly sporting strips of white tape across their small triangular nasal cast. 
